ISSUE 016

SOMETHING LOVELY
​that I saw

I've followed this creator for a little while - Rachel paints these amazing miniatures on paint sample charts, and I think they're so clever and charming! I hope you like them as much as I do.

SOMETHING USEFUL
​this week

The clearest positioning statements don't come from some magical flash of inspired word-lightning. They typically come from someone asking the same simple (usually tedious!) question four or five times in a row.

Taiichi Ohno built this into the Toyota Production System as the Five Whys. I've been personally obsessed with the power of this exercise for a long time (and am lucky enough to now work somewhere that has this embedded into their organisational process!). When something goes 'wrong' (it could be anything - you lost a project, you get gaps in your documentation etc etc) - you don't ask why once and assume that's the right answer. You ask why, then ask why again about that answer, then again, until you've stopped hitting excuses and hit the actual root cause. It's tempting to stop at a surface answer, but the methodology only works if you keep going past that. Turns out toddlers who do this instinctually are onto something!

I recently signed up to a writing class by Simone Grace Seol, who uses a version of this in her teaching. When a sentence sounds vague, she doesn't ask you to rewrite it. She gets you to ask yourself questions that pick at the 'surface' question until you get this really juicy detailed answer that is more like an intimate, special memory that you're sharing with someone.

Barbara Minto's Pyramid Principle uses the same mechanism under a different name - the "so what" test. You write a statement, ask so what, write the answer, ask so what again, and so on (and so on!). Each round strips out the part that sounded 'fine' but had no depth or meaning.

I love the simplicity of this, because it takes away this pressure to be super clever or feel like you need to get the thesaurus out. The power of a simple, plain question, asked again and again. The first answer your brain gives you is usually the safe, general (aka boring, surface!) one. Meanwhile, the specific, useful (and interesting, captivating and uniquely personal) one is sitting two or three questions further down - ready and waiting for you to find it if you just keep asking.

SOMETHING INTERESTING
​that I'd like to share

Ever heard of a spite house? They're real buildings, built for one purpose: to annoy someone. Can you imagine?? A neighbour blocks your view, so you build a wall of a house directly in their sightline. A family feud splits a block of land in half, so someone builds a house four feet wide out of pure stubbornness.

The Skinny House in Boston is one of the most famous, built by two brothers after one inherited a plot too small to build on and put up a spite house anyway, just to block his brother's sunlight. Or the one pictured above, in Alexandria, Virginia - a tiny brick house built in 1830 to fill an alleyway next to the owner's main property, stopping horse-drawn wagons from scraping his exterior walls and preventing people from loitering.

A bit overdramatic if you ask me but it makes for a good story!

If my CDS content or newsletter has taught you something you didn't know before - coffee's always appreciated.

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